Amygdala activity related to enhanced memory for pleasant and aversive stimuli

Pleasant or aversive events are better remembered than neutral events. Emot ional enhancement of episodic memory has been linked to the amygdala in ani mal and neuropsychological studies. Using positron emission tomography, we show that bilateral amygdala activity during memory encoding is correlated with enhanced episodic recognition memory for both pleasant and aversive vi sual stimuli relative to neutral stimuli, and that this relationship is spe cific to emotional stimuli. Furthermore, data suggest that the amygdala enh ances episodic memory in part through modulation of hippocampal activity Th e human amygdala seems to modulate the strength of conscious memory for eve nts according to emotional importance, regardless of whether the emotion is pleasant or aversive.